BY BEN WINTERS
 |
| Sinbad the Sanitized |
Another animated feature, another magical quest for source material from the public domain. This time DreamWorks has come back with “One Thousand and One Nights,” the millennium-old Persian/Irani adventure which includes the tales of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and, of course, Sinbad the Sailor.
The National Geographic headline “Sinbad Movie Largely Ignores Tale’s Arab Origins” seems to suggest that the new animated Brad Pitt vehicle Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is going to come in for a bit of a scolding. But, in fact, Stefan Lovgren’s piece doesn’t seem to mind that the producers have left out their lead character’s thousand years of pre-animated existence. Dating from the 10th century, “Sinbad’s adventures are part of One Thousand and One Nights, Arabic folktales that have been handed down for centuries,” Lovgren explains.
It’s kind of funny to note that the folks who told the tale of Sinbad originally and the people telling it now had at least some of the same motivations. “The tales—which include Ali Baba and the famous story of the 40 thieves and Aladdin and his magic lamp—may have originated from true stories, which were then embellished over time for entertainment value,” writes Lovgren. He then calls up Sinbad screenwriter John Logan, who adds that, “the original stories have great anthropological and literary appeal…But most importantly, we wanted our Sinbad movie to be a fun ride.”
Lovgren does not get too engaged with the cultural politics of a major American studio taking on a classic of Arab literature at this particular moment in world history. He simply notes that Logan “invented a new cosmology for the movie. The geographic locations in the movie are all fictitious. There are no theological references. The story even incorporates Greco-Roman mythology,” for example, the inclusion of a Michele Pfeiffer-voiced “goddess of Chaos” named Eris. Now, who was the God of Making Everything Caucasian, again?
The write-up of Sinbad in the Bay Area Metro newspapers is one of the very few reviews to go after the film for its sins of cultural omission: “During a time when so many Americans are coming smash up against the world of Islam, the new animated feature Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas offers a chance to revisit these gripping but beautiful stories,” writes Richard von Busack. “So turning Sinbad into an ancient Greek, as DreamWorks has, is worse than making a cheerful vaudeville out of Aladdin.”
Good News For Arts Funding! Just Kidding.
“Right now, things are about as bad as they’ve ever been for the arts in Cleveland.”
Save the “and that’s pretty bad” jokes because Cleveland is in no joking mood. As Thomas Mulready, creator of something called the Cool Cleveland Newsletter, recounts in the Cleveland Free Times recently, “Three of the region’s most important theatres…cancelled the tail end of their 2002-03 seasons earlier this year, mainly in an effort to stop the red ink. The Cleveland Film Society laid off half its staff…the majors are nervously raising and spending millions for huge capital projects…but their endowment investments are down, and they struggle with huge costs.”
As we all know by now, this kind of desperate situation is being played out in arts communities all over the county. The recent last-minute reprieve of New Jersey’s state arts council aside, cultural institutions are containing a general downward slide into financial instability, and the people writing about them are running out of metaphors for catastrophe.
The executive director of the Arts Council of Northwest Florida told the Pensacola News Journal that recent budget cuts have created “the perfect storm of funding situations.” The Rocky Mountain News out in Denver reports on an innovative cross-subscription program among various local theatres, initiated by Colorado Shakespeare Theatre after “falling attendance and a shrinking budget led the company to cut 20 staff positions.”
One way of looking at this continuing horror story as optimistically is things can’t get much worse than they are. (Well, they actually can since states have raided all their rainy day savings to make it through this budget year; we’ll see what happens in 2004-05.)
That certainly seems to the be the attitude of Eugene Gargaro,
Jr., brand new chairman of the board at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
He was interviewed by Detroit Free Press arts writer Frank Provenzano
and, after reporting the usual brutal bad news—“Ten years ago, the museum
received about $16 million. It’s possible that we’ll only receive $2 million
or less next fiscal year”—Gargaro speaks with confidence about DIA’s standing
and future: “We’re the fifth-largest museum in the country. We have the
reputation, and the obligation as the leading cultural institution in
the state to lead the effort to promote culture.”
He Twigged It?
 |
| Heaney had praise for ememem (below) |
 |
Good old foul-mouthed, violent rapper Eminem was praised to the high heavens recently by none other than Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, and papers around the world reported on the poet’s praise for the thug.
The rapper “has sent a voltage around a generation” Heaney told a group of journalists, according to the National Post in Toronto. “He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy…he has created a sense of what is possible.”
The question Heaney had answered was about whether any contemporary pop stars had the power to make a youthful audience think positively about poetry and lyricism. Britain’s Independent marks Heaney’s comments as “an extraordinary turnaround for an artist who once inspired protest rallies at awards ceremonies, enraged Sheffield University students into banning his records and who had enemies in the music industry ranging from Moby to Christina Aguilera.”
The best quotes come from Heaney’s son, Mick, a Dublin-based music journalist and not an Eminem fan. His father, he tells the Independent, “is not someone who tries to be trendy, and the fact that he’s responded that way shows that he’s twigged [Eminem’s] energy.”